Leith on life: Memory full

“What’s wrong with your stupid computer?”—My wife, about 10 days ago. “Nothing,”—Me. “Oh yeah?”—Wife.

As usual, she turned out to be right. My elderly desktop seldom runs anything more taxing than Microsoft Word, so works just about fine. But as soon as my wife sat down to edit a short video for her father’s 70th birthday party, it went over like Chris Christie trying to run the Marathon des Sables. It lurched. It burped. It played for time. It went blank and stared catatonically into whatever passes in a computer’s mind for the middle distance. Finally it collapsed altogether with a dreadful whirring of the fan.

The reason? That it had about 20 kilobytes of memory free: a full 260 gigabytes of its hard drive was silted up with family photographs. It took eight hours to back up our “Archive of Precious Memories (AOPM),” as I’d rather not call it, onto a removable hard drive and nearly as long again to delete it from the computer itself.

I do not raise this in an attempt to interest you in the running of the Leith family’s desktop computer. Rather, because the AOPM problem is one that I suspect nearly all of us now have. It’s not a computer problem—you can buy a terabyte of storage for about 50 quid. It’s a human data retrieval problem: accumulating several terabytes of family photographs is easily enough done, and might as well not be done at all.

Me, I had nothing much to do with cameras between birth and the age of 35. I didn’t have much to photograph, didn’t like photographs of myself, and regarded cameras as one of the foremost instruments of the devil’s work on Earth. I took the view, promulgated by Paul Theroux in his travel-writing days among others, that witnessing something through the viewfinder of a camera was a way of not properly witnessing it at all.

But, as for many of my stripe, two things arrived simultaneously: smartphones and children. Suddenly, there were lots of things to photograph and an ease in doing so that seemed to make it compulsory.

So the moment one or more of your kids puts on a silly hat, gets a faceful of jam, or similar, out comes the phone for the Kodak moment. You take half a dozen photographs, because in any given one there’s a hand over the mouth or one child’s eyes are shut—and in all but the most hopeless there’s something to catch the eye, so you keep them because why not? You repeat this process maybe 10 or 15 times in the course of a family day out. Then, barely noticed, the phone downloads them to your hard drive the moment you wander into wireless range.

So week by week, month by month, year by year, you accrete an archive on which every minute of your lives is recorded on camera—but, since you don’t edit as you go in any significant way, it might as well not be archived at all. The noise-to-signal ratio is overwhelming. You’ve effectively encrypted your memories by the brute force method: burying what you’d want to keep under a mountain of meh; muddying the crisply memorious image of a 1970s snapshot with a torrent of adjacent also-rans.

You have, effectively, your own catalogue-free Stasi archives, your own warehouse of Chilcot submissions, with a single archivist or clerk of court to sort through them. It’s like the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark: you may know it’s there, but you’d need another lifetime or two to actually find it. Here is an upside-down version of the Tristram Shandy problem: the record of the life isn’t struggling to catch up with the life; rather, the life, down the line, will struggle to catch up with the record.

The only solution I can think of is to invest in an old-fashioned Polaroid camera. Or, better yet, “record” your Kodak moments entirely on Snapchat—fix them on screen, and then let them evanesce a few seconds later so they imprint in the one place that matters: the human memory.